Climate Change This Week: Gore Comes Out of Winter Hibernation

In the wake of the recent irrefutable counterattack on climate change “science,” one would think that those who have forecasted the end of civilization would be running for the hills, or — at the very least — quietly dropping their phony claims and stepping aside in light of, well, the inconvenient truth. But leave it to Al Gore to make even more excuses for years of incompetence and dishonesty, and leave it to the New York Times to provide him a platform from which to pontificate.

And pontificate he did, in a weekend op-ed worthy of Michael Moore in terms of pure, unadulterated horse pucky. The former vice president once again wailed that we will face an “unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.” He should just come clean and tell us what he really means: redistributing the wealth, from our pockets to his.

Gore also valiantly defended those of his brethren exposed in the Climategate scandal, referring to the UK’s University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit e-mails as “stolen.” (As if that somehow justifies the corrupt content therein.) He further claimed the abused scientists involved had succumbed to the pressure of climate skeptics, blatantly ignoring that for years other scientists who questioned climate change found themselves either silenced or blacklisted.

He even went so far as to blame the U.S. Senate, by way of stalling the Obama administration’s cap-n-tax scheme, for other world leaders’ lack of commitment at the Copenhagen Summit. China, Gore confides conspiratorially, was really gung-ho about limiting its carbon emissions until the big, bad U.S. decided to take the low road.

The government Gore and others like him envision is a danger to our Essential Liberty. Preserving a government that encourages both a free market and free thinkers can mean not only the difference between prosperity and ruin, but literally between life and death. We need only to compare the recent earthquakes in Chile and Haiti to tell us this. The earthquake in Chile registered 8.8 on the Richter Scale, which was hundreds of times more powerful than the one that struck Haiti, but due in part to Chile’s superior infrastructure and wealth, only 708 people were killed, as opposed to more than 220,000 in the third-world Caribbean nation. Thankfully, more people are starting to realize that we cannot take our prosperity and our way of life for granted, and that includes vigorously confronting opportunistic charlatans like Al Gore.

In related news, the University of Tennessee is giving Gore an honorary doctoral degree because, gushed Chancellor Jimmy G. Cheek, “his work has quite literally changed our planet for the better.” Both the publisher and managing editor of The Patriot Post hold advanced degrees from the University of Tennessee and, accordingly, have submitted protests. (Our editors did actual research for their degrees.)